A health insurance company headed by an old friend from when President Obama was an Illinois state senator got a $340 million federal loan to establish Obamacare co-ops in New York, New Jersey and Oregon despite having a chronic record of consumer and regulatory complaints.

The New York-based Freelancers Insurance Company has been rated the “worst” insurer for two straight years by state regulators, and data compiled by a national insurance association show an extremely high rate of consumer complaints.

The firm was founded in 2008 by Sara Horowitz, who worked with Obama while he was in the Illinois state senate to launch Demos, a left-wing, New York think tank funded in part by George Soros.

Welcome to the strange new world of small-business hiring under ObamaCare. The law requires firms with 50 or more “full-time equivalent workers” to offer health plans to employees who work more than 30 hours a week. (The law says “equivalent” because two 15 hour a week workers equal one full-time worker.) Employers that pass the 50-employee threshold and don’t offer insurance face a $2,000 penalty for each uncovered worker beyond 30 employees. So by hiring the 50th worker, the firm pays a penalty on the previous 20 as well.

These employment cliffs are especially perverse economic incentives. Thousands of employers will face a $40,000 penalty if they dare expand and hire a 50th worker. The law is effectively a $2,000 tax on each additional hire after that, so to move to 60 workers costs $60,000.

President Obama and other Democrats attempted to win support for the health-care bill by touting it as a fiscally responsible enterprise. “I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits — either now or in the future,” Obama told a joint-session of Congress in September 2009. “I will not sign it if it adds one dime to the deficit, now or in the future, period.”

The new report exposes the “lack of honesty” surrounding such claims, Sessions argued. “The big-government crowd in Washington manipulated the numbers in order to get the financial score they wanted, in order to get their bill passed and to increase power and influence,” he said. “The goal was not truth or financial responsibility, but to pass the bill. This is how a country goes broke.”

The public remains divided and skeptical about the law and its effects. ObamaCare has always struggled in the court of popular opinion, and two new polls highlight the public’s continued lack of support for the law. Indeed, after a brief post-election rise in support, public opposition to ObamaCare is on the rise again.

February’s Kaiser Family Foundation health tracking poll puts opposition to the law at 42 percent and support at 36 percent; in Kaiser’s November poll, 43 percent said they supported the law and 39 percent opposed it.

A newly released Reason-Rupe poll offers some confirmation that more Americans hold negative views of the law. Asked an open-ended question about what comes to mind when they hear the term “ObamaCare,” 50 percent gave a negative response of some sort. At 24 percent, the largest single response was a generalized comment that the law is a bad thing.

Call Ted Cruz and Mike Lee and tell them you support their effort to strip the Continuing Resolution of funding to ObamaCare. A filibuster might be nice, too. 13 hours of free media regarding the costs and consequences of this horrible law can only be a good thing!

You haven’t seen anything yet. Consider this, the hospitals will have ultimate control of the health in the area via the required health associations or quality assurance groups. You have not had to deal with these people directly as your health has been managed by doctors. But hospital administrators are worse for doctors than malpractice lawyers. They now have a ticket for local monopolies and they don’t really care about if you get well or not. They will talk a good game and they will generate plenty of neat stats, but at the end of the day you only represent what is call a “life” and they are only interested in the bottom line.

A clue, know that someone does not have your best interest at heart when they start talking about what is “good for the patients”. This is a catch phrase used in medical meetings to shut up decent and make it appear that the proposed action is something that will actually benefit you when the exact opposite is true.

Finally, the final tab for this will be astronomical. I doubt we can calculate how much it will cost. Why doesn’t the Republican controled house defund this or since the court declared it a tax, a point of order should shut the whole thing down as it was not passed as a tax?

The Unaffordable Care Act is working as planned. The goal has always been the destruction of the private insurance industry for everyone except politicians, government workers and unions, aka, our betters.

I’m waiting for Obama to say “I said ‘not one thin dime.’ $6.2 trillion is NOT a dime and is NOT thin.”

I tell you, there are times when I get so disgusted at what our country has done to itself, that if I didn’t have kids and grandkids, I’d just bail and suck at the governmental teat. And start drinking heavily.

I still believe (I was going to say “hope” but that’s a four letter word now) that we can get our country back on the right path for my grandkids (self interest on my part) and our legacy as a country.

But there are days when I wonder if it is worth it anymore. I hear that retiring in the islands is pretty cheap. And then there is a beach, rum, coconuts and a pretty woman by my side.

Face it: liberals just don’t know how to do business, because most of them, like Obama, have never had a real job, never created a business, never had to deal with the results of their knee jerk legislation.

Every time they meddle in the tried and true business and banking practice, they screw it up. Case in point: the last and current housing boom/bust.